(May 13, 2025)
Michael Sanborn is the Director of the Banning Residence Museum in Wilmington. He reviewed the fascinating story of its founder, Phineas Banning, who was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1830. As a teenager, Phineas was working on the dockyards of Philadelphia, and at age 20 signed up to work in California. He sailed on a ship to Panama, crossed the Isthmus by mule and dugout canoe to the Pacific, and sailed on another ship to the fishing village on the shallow San Pedro Bay in “exotic” California.
He began as a store clerk, then as a stage coach driver connecting the port to the town of Los Angeles 20 miles north. He began his own staging & shipping company to support the increasing traffic. By the 1860s his stage coaches were traveling to Salt Lake City, the Kern River gold fields, the Fort Yuma military base in Arizona, and the Mormon settlement in San Bernardino. He began expanding the San Pedro harbor and docks to help his land business.
In the late 1850s, he and some investors bought land near San Pedro to dredge for port expansion, naming it Wilmington after his home town, and built his “Banning’s Landing”, where the first ocean-going vessel to the port anchored there in 1859.
In 1856 he married a sister of his first employer, and they had 8 children, of whom 3 survived into adulthood (life was tough). She died in childbirth in 1868. He married again in 1870 and had 3 more children, with 2 surviving into adulthood.
The Civil War broke out in 1860 after Abraham Lincoln’s election. Many Southern sympathizers were in the Los Angeles area. Banning donated land for a US military base in Wilmington, which was named Fort Drum and became the Union headquarters for the state of California and the territory of Arizona. He was later awarded an honorary title “Brigadier General”.
In the late 1860s he organized a railroad from the port to Los Angeles, and then sold it to the new Southern Pacific Railroad in 1873 to support cross-country rail expansion to Los Angeles. He got a patent for a design of a rail truck & wheel structure. He became a state senator to promote greater transportation connections, built the first breakwater in the port, and managed other business interests. He was in poor health the last 2 years of his life, and died in San Francisco in 1885, at age 54. His residence in Wilmington, the Banning House, is now a museum owned by the City of Los Angeles, and represents the Victorian era of California.